The most requested search item on this blog is “WordPress admin themes”. With variations of the various search terms, I would guess that we receive many hundreds of hits a day on just this blog from WordPress enthusiasts looking for themes to adorn their admin panel with. A simple search on Google reveals an old post from this blog listing 9 admin themes (I don’t link to it because most of the themes listed are dead or deprecated). Here is a list of nice admin themes that I can find, which are still being produced and regularly updated. Fluency Admin by Dean J. Robinson. A nice looking, well documented, well translated admin theme that is often updated. Wait for it ….. thats it!! (that I could find, please let us know if you know of others that are of high quality and updated regularly) There are various useful and popular […]

I saw a similar post on the LinkedIn WordPress Group posted by Mary Ann and I was intrigued. So without further ado, I would love to read about and be linked to The Top 5 Plugins that you WordPress Genuises use in every one of your WordPress installs and why are they so important to you?

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform with a large community volunteering its time to provide support to users in the WordPress Support Forums. Last week, the WordPress Support Forums mailing list presented nominations for the top active support forum volunteers. These volunteers were nominated for being active on the support forums within the last month and for helping multiple users almost every day on their own free time. The nominees were then organized by the number of topics they have been involved in since joining the forums to find this year’s top fifteen. If you stopped by the WordPress Support Forums this year, you were probably helped by one of these fifteen volunteers, or you at least got the chance to see them in action. Without further delay, here are the top fifteen active WordPress Support Forum volunteers: Mel “esmi” Pedley: Professional web developer since 2001 with a special interest […]

As of yesterday, WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is out of beta and ready to be installed! There is a lot to look forward to in this point oh version, including a whole bunch of new features, a whole new default theme called Twenty Ten, integration of WordPress MU and multiple blogs into WordPress (boy that seems like such a huge goal from just a few years ago to compete with MT) and a whole slew of bugfixes. The WordPress produced video is embedded below. This is a big one and I am really looking forward to having our team dive into the nitty gritty of this release as soon as possible. Six Revisions has an ultimate guide to the new features in WordPress 3.0, while Rohand Mehta tells us of the 10 features that he is looking forward to in WordPress 3.0. I also really appreciated Navjot’s list of Template Changes/Tags […]

I’ve seen a lot of “Best WordPress Plugins” lists, and there’s usually a lot of overlap on them. You don’t need me to tell you about Platinum SEO Pack, Simple Tags, and WP Super Cache. Here are a few plugins that I think deserve more attention. These will probably be more useful to power-users who really want to tweak their WordPress site, but I encourage everyone to get their hands dirty every once and a while and get creative with their installs. Unless otherwise noted, these should work with with both WordPress 2.92 and WordPress 3.0. Widget Logic This gives every widget an extra field in which you can specify WP’s conditional tags. What this means is that you can have certain widgets appear on certain pages but not others. For example, I have my blogroll set to only appear on my front page. SEO Friendly Images This plugin can […]

WordPress for iPhone OS 2.4.: WordPress for the iPad is now available, according to the WordPress for iPhone blog. The Automattic team has worked with Small Society to work on this new version. Find more details about the application at iphone.wordpress.org and also at the Next web writeup, which has some nice screenshots as well. Writing and editing posts along with streaming through comments and moderating them should be easier on this iPad version. I would love to hear some real world opinions on this product because it might make or break my desire to get myself another toy.

We continue our Best-Of Series today with download managers. Or, plugins for WordPress that will allow you to provide various files to your website visitors for download. Over the years I’ve gone through many. Everyone will have a different preference but, here is a list of my top plugins for managing downloads with WordPress… Drain Hole I’ve been using Drain Hole on my personal site to serve up my files for a couple years now. So far it is the best download manager plugin I’ve been able to find. It does everything it advertises and does it well. I’ve not yet had any issues with this plugin. I highly recommend it! WP-DownloadManager Before I found Drain Hole I used WP-DownloadManager exclusively. It did what I wanted and didn’t seem to have many problems. It has the features most would expect in such a plugin. It also has some you might […]

Over the years I’ve tried pretty much every contact form plugin available for WordPress. Some were pretty bad, some were almost there, and a select few really shined. Today I’m going to list those few that really do the contact form job right. Lets begin… Contact Me Widget I really love the Contact Me Widget. I think this plugin takes the simple contact form to a whole new level. Not only does it have a contact form but also an IM function and a place to put all your other contact info. All in one neat little package. Do note though that this plugin relies on the ContactMeButton.com service. So, you may not want to depend on it as the sole option for your visitors to get in contact with you. If the ContactMeButton site were to go down or something, well… I’m sure you can imagine plenty of horrible […]

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, there are a slew of options out there. Some good and some not so good. But today I want to talk about the best options out there for WordPress. There are many. But I’m going to try to sift through the cruft to find the truly great tools that are available. Here we go… All In One SEO Pack I suppose the most obvious plugin is the All In One SEO Pack. According to statistics it is the most popular plugin in the whole WordPress Extend repository. It has a robust feature set. Of all the SEO-related WordPress plugins I have tried it is, in my opinion, the best there currently is. The plugin allows you to optimize various things in WordPress for search engines including your site title, your keywords, page titles, and much more. One of the features I like the […]

About the Author

Mark Ghosh

An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.